Facetious jests ... it's about all these drug 'experts' are good for

Updated:
03:49 EST, 15 February 2009

Does the Government secretly want to legalise drugs, in the hope that we’ll all be too stupefied to complain about their corruption and incompetence? Certainly, governments of both major parties have behaved for years as if this is what they seek to do. They can’t formally do so, because of binding international treaties. But they can achieve the same effect by undermining their own laws, demoralising the police and the courts and so ensuring that the laws are not properly enforced.

Here’s the trick. You thunder angrily against evil drug-dealers – who wouldn’t have any business if there weren’t also millions of evil drug-takers. But at the same time, you make it plain, in everything else that you do, that you don’t much care and don’t really mean it.

Last week the body that advises the government on illegal drugs recommended Ecstasy be downgraded to a Class B substance

Take bodies such as the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Their current chairman, Professor David Nutt, is a typical modern ‘expert’ – that is, one without any deep moral objection to people stupefying themselves for fun.

That’s the reason for his babyish scribbling, facetiously comparing people who swallow poisonous Ecstasy tablets with people who ride horses. I don’t do either. Both, it’s true, have similar physical risks. But one involves courage, skill and judgment. The other just requires self-indulgence and a degree of reckless stupidity.

RELATED ARTICLES

Share this article

Share

I suspect that the long-term mental health risks of Ecstasy, like those of cannabis, are only just beginning to emerge. In these druggie days, when even the leader of the Tory Party is ambiguous about dope, who wants to pay for such research, and if nobody pays, who will do it?

For instance, a few years ago the powerful global PR campaign which seeks to legalise dope had nearly succeeded in persuading government, establishment figures and the media that cannabis was ‘soft’ and safe.

This was the most disgraceful falsehood. As Professor Robin Murray, senior consultant psychiatrist at London’s Maudsley Hospital, recently put it: ‘Cannabis is now one of the biggest problems on inpatient psychiatric wards in England’s major cities.’

He added: ‘The increase in the prevalence and the deteriorating outcomes of schizophrenia due to cannabis use is the main reason why psychiatric services in London are in such a mess.’

And he also warned: ‘No drugs that alter brain chemistry are totally safe.’ I think Professor Murray is much too mild in his statements. He underestimates the huge value of his expert warnings to parents and others, trying, against the tide, to keep their children away from these poisons.

Drugs that were thought of as the resort of inadequates and no-hopers 60 years ago have been made fashionable and popular by the relentless pro-drug lyrics of the rock music industry. The damage that this has done, and continues to do, is beyond measure – not least because so much of it takes the form of grief, broken hopes, disappointment and loss, which no research can quantify.

Anyone who thinks this is a subject for facetious jests ought, in my view, to go to Hell.

Not for Children: Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail as young Salim in Slumdog Millionaire

Feelgood? More like torture

I had planned to go to see the film Slumdog Millionaire, if only to check that everyone in it refers to Bombay as ‘Bombay’ rather than the ridiculous ‘Mumbai’ which was imposed on the city by Hindu nationalist fanatics and is hated by most people who live there.

But I’m not going to, because so many who have seen it say the same thing.

Here’s one: ‘I made the enormous error of going out with my daughter and sister to the cinema to see Slumdog Millionaire. It was billed as family entertainment. What a mistake I made . . . the first scene is torture, then squalor, then more torture and then they burn a child’s eyes out, or at least that was what they were about to do when I left.’

Be warned. This is not a ‘feelgood’ film and should never have been sold as one.

Prince Harry has been sent to a re-education camp so that he will never again use the expression ‘Paki’. Why is it that I think this news is so much worse than the original offence? Because the whole idea of these courses is fundamentally totalitarian.

The same sinister phrase ‘Equality and Diversity’ crops up here. This is what Harry is to be taught. It is also what Nurse Caroline Petrie – and all other nurses – have been ordered to promote. I think we will find, as the months slip by, that more and more of us are required by law, or threats to our employment, to endorse this creepy objective. Passive compliance is not good enough. You must say that you love Big Brother.

As for the case of Jennie Cain, embroiled in a mad row over what her five-year-old daughter told a classmate about Hell, she and Mrs Petrie should probably be quite glad all this is going on.

If the Christian religion is publicly identified as the most hated foe of all the boot-faced PC commissars – as it is – then perhaps it has a future after all. There’s nothing like a bit of persecution to get the numbers up.

That's the way to turn off iPod zombies

A 'No iPods' street sign

There’s something nasty and arrogant about the wearing of iPods in the street. They turn people into unreachable zombies, who have to dewire themselves before they can engage in conversation.

You often see cyclists charging down the pavement, scattering pedestrians, with the telltale wires coming out of their ears, their heads full of angry noise.

How convenient for them that they can’t hear the curses and execrations of everyone round them. They also can’t hear traffic, which puts them in great danger. When I was in Prague recently, I spotted an enjoyable ‘No iPods’ street sign. Perhaps we could have some here.

* Can I be the only person sick to the teeth of the BBC’s incessant Darwin Festival? It’s bad enough having this flunked parson and failed doctor (though he was a reasonable taxidermist) on the £10 note. I’m quite prepared to consider the possibility that his theory (welcomed by all kinds of nasty people because it licensed their genocidal projects or freed them from guilt) may conceivably be true. But I do get tired of bossy people ordering me to believe in it. I also get cross when I’m told by Darwinist bigots that if I dare to doubt Darwin, then I must believe in the literal truth of the Bible. I don’t. Like everyone else, I have no idea how the realm of Nature took its present form.

* Alfie Patten, four feet tall, is a father at 13. What I very much want to know is how much sex education he (and 15-year-old mother Chantelle Steadman) had. My guess is lots and lots. Also, the Useless Tories, who in decades of government never lifted a little finger to reverse the tide of permissiveness, should not dare to try to make capital out of this.